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Netflix is hardly the Criterion Channel—it doesn’t offer many classics, whether international or Hollywoodian. It’s not OVID.tv, or Mubi, or even Amazon; its selection of recent international and independent films is slender. Most of the best movies I’ve found there were released in the past ten years, even the past five, a bias that reinforces the fetishism of current techniques, moods, references, and idioms. Nonetheless, just as mud is a good place to find gold nuggets, Netflix, with some careful sifting, is a good place to find great movies, and a viewer with no other platforms at hand could keep busy and happy there for quite a while. A surprising number of the movies that I’ve most esteemed in recent years—and even a handful of venerable classics—are available to stream on it right now. Here are forty of them, in alphabetical order:
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“American Factory”: One of the rare recent cases where the Oscars did well: this documentary, by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, is both a telescope and a microscope, uniting the local impact of globalized businesses and the international reach of local institutions and customs.
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“Atlantics”: The confluence of genres and ideas in Mati Diop’s first feature—a tale of labor relations and their political implications, a yearning romance, a drama of migration, a ghost story—is matched by her deeply textured and richly imaginative style.
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“The B-Side”: A fascinating portrait of a portraitist: Elsa Dorfman, a photographer whose large-format Polaroids are masterworks of technique and sensibility, shares her life story and her fund of wisdom with the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.
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“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”: The Coen brothers’ six brief Western sketches blend self-conscious antics and melodramatic poignancy with theological designs and the rampant cruelty of raw places and times.
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“Bathtubs Over Broadway”: Dava Whisenant’s high-spirited documentary, about unintentionally ludicrous yet catchy musicals written and staged for corporations, is also the story of a fan who has sought for decades to preserve the shows’ legacy—and of the artists who created them.
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“Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened”: The Stephen Sondheim musical drama “Merrily We Roll Along” was a colossal disaster when it opened—and quickly closed—in 1981; this documentary, by Lonny Price, a member of the original cast, traces its development and its afterlife, as well as its effect on his own life and that of his fellow-performers.
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“The Bling Ring”: Sofia Coppola’s teen true-crime drama is also a vision of the transformative power of social media and the art of the selfie—and evidence that not all self-transformations are alike.
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“The Burial of Kojo”: The Ghanaian musician Blitz Bazawule’s first feature is a luminous memory piece of family and city life, from the perspective of a child, that conjures a teeming and lyrical subjectivity to match.
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“Burning Cane”: Phillip Youmans—who directed this film at the age of seventeen—displays a preternatural maturity, both emotional and aesthetic, in this drama about an elderly woman’s effort to protect her grandson and her daughter-in-law from her irresponsible son.
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“By the Sea”: The fourth film directed by Angelina Jolie is an intense erotic melodrama, set in the nineteen-seventies, about an artistic couple’s collapsing marriage amid the labyrinthine luxuries of the French Mediterranean coast.
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“Carrie” (2013): This adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, directed by Kimberly Peirce, is better than the one directed by Brian De Palma; so sue me.
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“Don Verdean”: The religious element of Jared Hess’s loopy comedies here finds its most radical and disturbing expression, in a tale of an archeologist looking for artifacts to prove the historical authenticity of the Bible.
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“A Ghost Story”: David Lowery’s low-budget, clandestinely made mystery tale turns the humorous conceit of a comic-book-style ghost into one of the most grandly imaginative and exquisitely nuanced romantic dramas of recent years.
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“Good Time”: This wild ride of a crime drama, which the Safdie brothers made just before “Uncut Gems,” is filled with the turmoil of Queens streets and makes its political context all the more conspicuous.
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“GoodFellas” (leaving April 30th): No, Martin Scorsese doesn’t glamorize gangsters, but he certainly understands the point of view of people who do—and the relentless desire that makes society, high and low, run.
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“Happy as Lazzaro”: Alice Rohrwacher audaciously links two tales—one of neo-feudalism at a rural Italian estate and another of urban scavenging in the modern city—by way of the wondrous adventures of a mystical, mythical innocent.
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“High Flying Bird”: Steven Soderbergh infuses this tale of the business of pro basketball—and the efforts of black athletes and agents to confront its inequities—with passionate energy and a brash sense of swing.
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“Hugo”: Adapting a children’s novel by Brian Selznick, Martin Scorsese tells a fanciful version of the real-life story of the innovative French director Georges Méliès (whose career began in the eighteen-nineties) and his sad final years—and about the very essence of cinematic innovation.
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“I Called Him Morgan”: Kasper Collin’s insightful and wide-ranging documentary about the great and short-lived jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan is centered on the only extant recorded interview with his common-law wife, Helen Morgan, who killed him.
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“Imperial Dreams”: Malik Vitthal’s first feature is a tense drama about a young black writer’s struggle with the Kafkaesque nightmare of the carceral system and its long reach into family life.
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“The Irishman” : The fastest three and a half hours I’ve had at the movies in quite a while—and it plays even better on Netflix, where you can pause it and make it last even longer.
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“Jersey Boys”: Clint Eastwood turns this adaptation of a musical play about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons into a panoramic tale of the political underpinnings of American pop culture.
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“Krisha”: Krisha Fairchild stars in this turbulent and tender family drama, directed with fierce urgency by her nephew Trey Edward Shults, that’s set around an apocalyptic Thanksgiving celebration.
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“The Laundromat”: Steven Soderbergh’s tale of international money laundering and its effect on local business, politics, and family life includes some startlingly, sardonically comedic sequences, as well as some scintillating performances (starting with that of Meryl Streep).
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“Maps to the Stars”: Shockingly, David Cronenberg hasn’t made a movie since this scathing inside-Hollywood horror-satire, from 2014—which suggests just how spot-on it is.
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“Marriage Story”: I consider this end-of-a-marriage story to be one of the great legal thrillers; the real protagonists are three divorce lawyers, played with dialectical glee by Laura Dern, Alan Alda, and Ray Liotta.
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“The Master”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s distinctive ideas about a quasi-religious cult—namely, that it catches on because it actually helps some people—are matched by the florid and resonant performances he elicits, particularly from Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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“Moonlight”: Barry Jenkins’s second feature starts at a rare emotional pitch and stylistic inspiration from which it only grows deeper and more daring.
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“The Other Side of the Wind”: Though Orson Welles didn’t complete the editing of his final dramatic feature, about a reckless filmmaker burning through the tail end of his career, it resounds with his titanic and self-scourging inspiration from start to finish.
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“Planetarium”: Natalie Portman stars in the French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s quietly extravagant drama, set in the nineteen-thirties, as a medium who, along with her sister (Lily-Rose Depp), is hired by a producer who’s devising a camera that can film spirits.
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“The Queen”: Frank Simon’s 1968 documentary, about a drag pageant at New York’s Town Hall, is a crucial precursor to “Paris Is Burning”; here, a group of gay men speak candidly about their lives, at a time when they were at risk of prosecution, while the tensions behind the scenes of the competition risk bursting out onstage.
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“Results”: Andrew Bujalski, the primordial mumblecore director, is fascinated by the details of small businesses—here, a gym that’s run by a principled entrepreneur whose financial troubles put him at odds with the woman he loves (and who works for him).
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“Roxanne Roxanne”: Michael Larnell’s bio-pic about the rapper Roxanne Shanté is filled with fervent performances and trenchant, pain-filled visions of the hostility that she faced in the music business—and the violence that she faced in her private life.
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“School Daze”: Spike Lee’s second feature, from 1988, is both an exuberant musical and an incisive drama about social and political divisions in the student body of a historically black college.
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“A Serious Man”: The Coen brothers’ raucously sardonic drama, set in 1967, about a Jewish family in a suburb of Minneapolis, where they grew up, is also a philosophical tale about the links between Jewish identity and American popular culture.
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“Shirkers”: The title of Sandi Tan’s feature refers both to this documentary and to the freewheeling, independent science-fiction film that she and friends shot as teen-agers in Singapore, in 1992; the troubling story of its incompletion is the mystery that the filmmaker probes.
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“The Social Network”: David Fincher captures the epochal shock of life online along with the weird imbalance of its inventors’ abilities and their personalities.
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“13th”: This documentary by Ava DuVernay, about the development of the American carceral state in an effort to deny black Americans their civil rights, is a probing work of historical analysis and a revelation of an ongoing crime against humanity.
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“While We’re Young”: Noah Baumbach’s comedic drama, set in the milieu of New York independent filmmaking, is centered on the clash of three generations of filmmakers and their artistic and practical ideas.
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“Win It All”: Joe Swanberg, who builds solid dramatic frameworks for his largely improvised movies—and who worked with Baumbach in the late two-thousands—here confects a tense and turbulent tale of a Chicago gambler in hot water with his creditors.
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